A few weeks since she found out her children’s father had been killed while crossing the road near their home on Aurora’s far East Side, the numbness brought on by shock and grief is beginning to subside enough for Christine Kotars to feel again.

Now she’s dealing with that sharp pain of losing her soulmate and partner of 15 years. She’s feeling the pressure of having to take over as a single mom and only breadwinner for their two small children.

And she’s starting to feel anger: Anger at the circumstances surrounding the death of 37-year-old LaRenzo Bryant, who was struck by a vehicle just after 11 p.m. March 31 at the intersection of Ogden Avenue and Long Grove Drive in Aurora.

Was the 19-year-old driver of the vehicle at fault? Was the lighting adequate?

LaRenzo, a former basketball standout, worked out daily and loved to walk whenever he could, Kotars said. And he’d made that trek to the convenience store across Ogden from the Georgetown subdivision so many times she wondered why, on this night, he was fatally struck.

Earlier that evening, Kotars said, she and LaRenzo had taken their two children — Michael, 10, and LaNiyah, 8 — to see the movie “A Wrinkle in Time,” and after the kids were in bed, she started putting their Easter baskets together.

When she found out she was out of cigarettes, LaRenzo took upon himself to make that 10-minute walk across Ogden to the nearby store to pick up a pack … typical of him, Kotars said, because he was always trying to “beat me to the punch” when it came to doing favors for one another.

Kotars says when he hadn’t returned by the time she had finished putting the Easter baskets together, she figured he stopped off at his best friend’s house across the street.

She dozed off. But when she awoke at 4 a.m. and he was still not home, she grew anxious, calling his phone repeatedly and becoming more alarmed as those attempts went directly to voice mail.

“Dizzy and nauseous” at this point, Kotars called the Aurora Police Department, still in denial something was seriously wrong … until she supplied a description of LaRenzo to the APD, and was told a police officer would be coming to her home.

It was Easter morning by now.

“First and foremost, LaRenzo was a father,” she said, “and would have been with his kids” had something horrible not happened.

Denise Crosby / The Beacon-News

A white cross memorializes 37-year-old LaRenzo Bryant, who was killed while trying to cross the intersection of Odgen Avenue and Long Grove Drive in Aurora the night before Easter. A vigil will be held at the site on April 29

A white cross memorializes 37-year-old LaRenzo Bryant, who was killed while trying to cross the intersection of Odgen Avenue and Long Grove Drive in Aurora the night before Easter. A vigil will be held at the site on April 29 (Denise Crosby / The Beacon-News)

And so the baskets and the holiday barbecue they had planned were replaced by the hard task of identifying LaRenzo’s body over the phone; notifying his large extended family; and, hardest of all, telling her young children, who had been with neighbors all day, their father was not coming home.

Three weeks later, now finally coming out of grief’s fog, Kotars has been in touch with police, and wants to talk to city officials about her concerns as to why LaRenzo was killed crossing a road he’s walked so many times before. And she is hoping to bring more attention to the tragedy by holding a vigil at 3 p.m. April 29 around a white cross erected near the intersection where he died.

“I’m angry,” she said. “And I want some answers.”

The investigation is still ongoing, as officials wait for forensics to come back from the lab, according to an Aurora Police Department spokesman. That intersection did not make the list of Top 30 crash intersections in the city in 2017, police said. Still, Kotars is asking for more lighting to be installed at that busy intersection just east of Eola and Ogden.

And, as much an anything, she wants people to remember her husband as more than an accident statistic or a police news story. LaRenzo Bryant loved his job as a forklift operator at O’Reilly Distribution Center in Naperville, she told me. He was responsible, popular, well loved by friends and family, an excellent athlete who had lived in Lombard and Bolingbrook but had moved to the Georgetown subdivision in Aurora a year ago, which was near his late parents’ house.

Living by their home, she said, was his way of grieving his mother and father, who passed away just a couple years apart.

Family came first to him, which was not only evident from his devotion to his kids, but he was planning a large family reunion this summer, Kotars told me. And the following summer the couple were planning to marry.

“I want people to know he was an important person in this world to everyone he touched … and he didn’t deserve to die this way,” she said. “We are having this vigil because this was a senseless accident that should never have happened.”